ATA100 Controller Cards & Performance

[f1br0pt1kl]

I plan to get a Promise Ultra100TX2 ATA100 Controller Card; but was curious how the performance will be on that compared to the ide on the motherboard? (D845GBL Intel) I plan to have my main drive on the first one (40GB) alone on the first ide port and then two 80GB on the second ide port. I'll put my DVD and CD-RW onto the board, as well as the floppy.

Thanks.

 

[IwishIcouldprogramandhack]

Bump for this question.

Also, gonna buy a ATA100 controller card. I have 2 hard drives, a CDRW and dvd drive. What would be the optimum configuration? I was thinking the 2 hd's attached to the controller card, both set as master. and the Dvd and CD-rw both attached to the mobo, also both set as masters. I have an epox 8k7a.

Any opinions welcome.

 

[bacillus]

you should get similiar performance!

 

[mrzed]

The performance difference will be almost zero. The noticable performance difference will be exactly zero. The 845 chipset is already ATA 100 compliant.

Your only reason to get the card would be to support your 5 IDE devices. If you want to increase performance, get a raid card and run your 2 80 Gb drives in RAID0. Although even then, you will only see a noticable increase in larger file transfers. Whether it's worth it or not depends on how you use your box, and what your risk tolerance is.

IwishIcouldprogramandhack: If I were you I would skip the expense. Run both your hard drives as masters on a seperate IDE channel. Your optical drives should do just fine as slaves. The main thing you want to do is keep your to/from transfers on seperate channels to maximize performance. The best way to do this would be to keep the optical drive that you use most often (probably your DVD) on the opposite channel from your main HD.

Setting each device as a master would be the best way to do it if you did get an add on card, but IMO will not give you any really noticable improvement in most situations.